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This course presents a comparative study of Christian and Islamic paradigms (sixth to the thirteenth centuries) in the construction of religious experience through the material fabric of the building, the interior decor, objects, and rituals. We will read medieval ekphrastic texts and poetry, which stirred the viewer/participant to experience the building/object as animate. Among the sites we will study are: Hagia Sophia, the Ka'ba, the Dome of teh Rock, the Mosque at Damascus and at Cordoba. We will read Byzantine and Arabic writers such as Paul the Silentiary, Patriarch Germanos, Maximus Confessor, Shahrawardi, and Ibn Arabi.

Political philosophy in classical antiquity, centered on reading canonical works of Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle against other texts and against the political and historical background. Topics include: interdependence, legitimacy, justice; political obligation, citizenship, and leadership; origins and development of democracy; law, civic strife, and constitutional change.

COMPLIT 10N:Shakespeare and Performance in a Global Context

Preference to freshmen. The problem of performance including the performance of gender through the plays of Shakespeare. In-class performances by students of scenes from plays. The history of theatrical performance. Sources include filmed versions of plays, and readings on the history of gender, gender performance, and transvestite theater. Note: To be eligible for WAYS credit, you must take the course for a Letter Grade.

COMPLIT 11Q:Shakespeare, Playing, Gender

Preference to sophomores. Focus is on several of the best and lesser known plays of Shakespeare, on theatrical and other kinds of playing, and on ambiguities of both gender and playing gender. Note: This course must be taken for a letter grade to be eligible for WAYS credit.

COMPLIT 51Q:Comparative Fictions of Ethnicity (AMSTUD 51Q, CSRE 51Q)

We may "know" "who" we "are," but we are, after all, social creatures. How does our sense of self interact with those around us? How does literature provide a particular medium for not only self expression, but also for meditations on what goes into the construction of "the Self"? After all, don't we tell stories in response to the question, "who are you"? Besides a list of nouns and names and attributes, we give our lives flesh and blood in telling how we process the world. Our course focuses in particular on this question--Does this universal issue ("who am I") become skewed differently when we add a qualifier before it, like "ethnic"? Note: To be eligible for WAYS credit, you must take course for a Letter Grade.

COMPLIT 101:What Is Comparative Literature?

What is literature, and how has it been imagined, institutionalized, praised, and criticized over the centuries by authors ranging from Aristotle to Schiller, from Arnold to Auerbach, Woolf, Said, Achebe, Spivak and others, who have understood literature as a powerful tool for individual and social change? What does it mean to "compare" literature or study texts that belong or tap into more than one national literary and cultural tradition or consciously posit themselves as participating in international movements (such as European Decadence or Modernism), or authors who live and produce their work in transcultural contexts and often write in different languages, such as Samuel Beckett or Gloria Anzaldúa? How do markers of identity such as gender, sexuality, and race (and our changing conceptions of them over time) factor into our intellectual theories and practices in comparing texts and authors? Along with several case studies of texts and authors that will help us explore and probe these questions, we will also gain familiarity with major theories and developments in the field of comparative literature.

How did the triumphant author of "the great American novel"
Lolita evolve from the young author writing at white heat for the tiny sad Russian emigration in Berlin? We will read his short stories and the novels
The Luzhin Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, Lolita, Lolita the film, and
Pale Fire, to see how Nabokov generated his sinister-playful forms as a buoyant answer to the "hypermodern" visual and film culture of pre-WWII Berlin, and then to America's all-pervading postwar "normalcy" in his pathological comic masterpieces
Lolita and
Pale Fire. Buy texts in translation at the Bookstore; Slavic grad students will supplement with reading and extra sessions in original Russian.

COMPLIT 121:Poems, Poetry, Worlds (DLCL 141)

What is poetry? How does it speak in many voices to questions of philosophy, history, society, and personal experience? Why does it matter? The reading and interpretation of poetry in crosscultural comparison as experience, invention, form, sound, knowledge, and part of the world. The readings address poetry of several cultures (Brazil, Chile, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Occitania, Peru) in comparative relation to that of the English-speaking world, and in light of classic and recent theories of poetry.

COMPLIT 122:Literature as Performance (DLCL 142)

Theater as performance and as literature. Historical tension between text and spectacle, thought and embodiment in western and other traditions since Greek antiquity. Dramas read in tandem with theory, live performances, and audiovisuals.

COMPLIT 123:The Novel and the World (DLCL 143)

The European Design of the Novel. The course will trace the development of the modern literary genre par excellence through some of its great milestones from the 17th century to the present. Works by Cervantes, Austen, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Queirós, Kafka, Woolf, Verga, and Rodoreda.